12 February, 2016

Review – XCOM 2

By
Kyle Shimmin

War-weary and emotionally scarred, I wrapped up my first
game of XCOM 2 and hunkered down for a review, turns out I was hunkering a
while… It’s a long review, a testament to the breadth of the XCOM 2 experience
and subsequently, the range of my feelings on it.

XCOM 2

We had a pretty standard relationship, with the usual ups
and downs. Oh heady were those first few deployments, after which I explored with
nervous glee all the permutations of punk-meets-special ops that I could dream
up. However, once that initial novelty had worn out, as it must, I caught
myself seeing flaws, faults that I had remained ignorant to at first. Then as
if in response to my hardening demeanour, XCOM 2 decided to turn frosty and
domineering, it reduced our romance to distinctly sadistic depths, with my
computer and by extension me taking all the hits. So gruelling was the
experience that no amount of mid to late-game strategic satisfaction could
truly patch up what we once had.

For those who didn’t play XCOM: Enemy Unknown, or the
expansion Enemy Within, it is worth noting that even at its best, at its
highest peaks, the game is a journey of pleasure and pain. XCOM 2 quite
literally doubled the busting of my unmentionables, but not in the way I
wanted.

XCOM 2 is harder, in my experience this was particularly
true for the first twenty or so hours, and perhaps the final one too. In this
timeline the aliens succeeded in their invasion of Earth, the XCOM organisation
under your leadership failed to beat back the UFOs, it quite literally picks up
after a failed ending of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Some years later the aliens have
entrenched themselves in human society as the ADVENT organisation; apparently
ignorant, humanity lives under its rule, with slick-armoured troopers
patrolling the streets and the smooth-talking Speaker delivering subduing spiels.

Thought your funding was bad in Enemy Unknown? Well, now you
command a band of guerrillas, so be prepared to have even less. The game opens
with a heavily scripted tutorial introducing the most of the new mechanics and
the old basics, after that and a tour of the Avenger – your airborne base – the
game opens quite fully. For those not versed in the XCOM formula, the game
operates on two levels; strategic and tactical, and both have changed
significantly in XCOM 2.

On the tactical front, I have only praises. Its predecessor
introduced a tight, 3D grid-based combat system, which operates with turns,
questionable line of sight mechanics, and fickle hit percentages. The core
functionality and interface remains intact; XCOM soldiers have two action
points per turn, with which to move, shoot, assume overwatch (a defensive
stance that allows reactive shots to alien movement), and so forth. The biggest
addition here is the concealment, which basically allows your soldiers to shoot
first – its huge, take it from me.

As you’re a guerrilla organisation you are almost always on
the offensive, launching raids on ADVENT facilities, assaulting convoys, and
the like. The concealment system activates when the mission begins, and
prevents your soldiers from being seen unless they tread in the detection area
of enemy troops or surveillance equipment, marked with red eyes on the movement
grid. This allows you to spring elaborate ambushes, to unleash clockwork murder
through effective use of overwatch and advantageous cover. Once the first shot
is fired concealment breaks, and the enemy troops run for protection,
triggering any overwatch you might have set. If you’re patient, tactically
aware, and more than a little lucky, you can eliminate a third, or perhaps even
half of the enemy force before they even have a chance to shoot back. And
that’s satisfying as hell.

The other new mechanic I really dig is armour, which
manifests as yellow hexagons at the end of a unit’s health bar. Armour absorbs
damage – obviously – if I shoot an alien with one armour and deal four damage,
only three damage will actually be deducted from the enemy’s health, if I shoot
that alien again the armour will absorb some of that shot too. So with that in
mind, consider how difficult inflicting meaningful damage on a late game enemy
might become, when it’s protected with perhaps six hexes of armour?

Fortunately for the (mostly) brave XCOM soldiers, certain
weapons can destroy armour; explosives and the grenadiers’ cannon in
particular. Nonetheless it’s the kind of intuitive system that thrives in the
XCOM tactical formula; it simple to understand, yet alters every combat
encounter it appears in.

There’s also hacking and loot mechanics. Hacking is
effectively a dice roll, while the loot system replaces the Meld from Enemy
Within; requiring you to divert soldiers to pick up items from a fallen enemy
before they expire. Neither system is offensive in their implementation, nor
revolutionary.

The other tactical changes come in the abilities of the XCOM
soldiers and the alien troops. Your soldiers come in five classes; rangers, grenadiers,
specialists, sharpshooters, and psi operatives, though pretty much all begin as
unspecialised rookies. Soldiers gain experience and level up by killing aliens,
at each new level you’re faced with a choice between one new tide-turning
ability or another. Unlike Enemy Unknown, XCOM 2’s choices feel more evenly
balanced. In the case of the sharpshooter, for example; squadsight is unlocked
from the get-go, and many of the future options revolve around more advanced
use of the sniper rifle or pistol. Squadsight allows a sharpshooter to shoot
enemies sighted by other squad members – I would never go into an Enemy Unknown
battle without it.

The alien forces have changed far more drastically, in terms
of both visual style and combat abilities. Their ranks are bolstered by
decidedly human troopers and mechs, complete with big guns and shoulder-mounted
grenade launchers. Don’t worry however, there are still plenty of real
alien-looking aliens too, with Mutons and Chryssalids ready to shred your
battles plan with reckless abandon.

Your soldiers are more than faceless grunts, at least they
can be; assuming you don’t get them killed a mission or two into their careers.
As in Enemy Unknown, you can change soldier’s names, faces, voices, and so
forth, but XCOM 2 adds a lot of neat details, like date of birth and short
bios, providing a snippet of backstory. More than anything though, the visual
customisation has been blown out to an appreciative degree; you can now fully
control armour variations, colours, and patterns,
and even add hot accessories like nose studs and cigarettes.

The options are fantastic; I spent hours, multiple hours crafting
my squads, applying styles and making up stories – mostly in my head. I admit however,
I am a little perturbed that hairstyles, such as cornrows and dreadlocks of all
varieties, are held behind the Sergeant rank. I love the idea that they are
simply too hot for rookies to handle, but I can’t help ponder the possibly of
less palatable reasons.

It was in no small part due to the customisation options
that my sharpshooter ‘Bolt’ transitioned from the least cool member of my first
squad, to the saviour of my last. She wasn’t one of the soldiers I poured a lot
of attention into initially, but she grew into a survivor, suffering mental and
physical scarring along the way. She deployed on that first mission of my
campaign – excluding the tutorial – and in last, in which she killed more than
a dozen aliens; quite literally five in one turn through the use of high-level
abilities. It speaks greatly of its character, that XCOM, an exceedingly
system-heavy game, can allow me to develop this kind of emotional investment –
I didn’t even give her a custom name or nickname.

Just as the in-mission tactical layer received new ancillary
mechanics and gameplay tweaks, so too did the strategic layer. As I mentioned
earlier, you’re a guerrilla organisation based out of a repurposed UFO; you
don’t deploy satellites to earn cash, you meet resistance contacts and build
radio installations. You construct a network which is actually quite different
from Enemy Unknown, which saw your resources increase through satellites, then decrease
through attrition and the loss of support as nations would pull out.

Rather than waiting for alien attacks, you wait for guerrilla
targets of opportunity to appear, or raid known ADVENT facilities. You pass
time by flying across the globe and scanning areas of interest for all types of
resources, including recruits, scientists, and engineers. Both scientists and
engineers are named, with real characters with models, portraits, and
everything. This elevates them from mere numbers to be increased, to actual
people upon whom the war very much hangs. Scientists simply speed up research
projects, while engineers have to be assigned to specific facilities or to building
projects, which left me wishing that the scientists were integrated in a similarly
involved manner.

There are things I actively dislike about the strategic
layer; the interface and the placement of certain functionality raises my
hackles, in a way that only people with a passion for interface design and user
experience will understand. Namely the facilities; there is a serious haze
around how some of them operate, a problematic disconnect between naming and
function, with important mechanics poorly explained, or indeed not explained at
all. The game masks its strong core features with a veneer of complexity, which
adds precisely nothing, but can slow the player down considerable. Up until
around hour fifteen hour mark, about halfway through a game, I couldn’t shake
the feeling that I was being rushed in the short term, in the tactical layer,
but stalled in the strategic layer.

You’re spurred into action by the ominous ‘Avatar Project’, in
essence a countdown to humanities final subjugation. Every few weeks the aliens
will make progress, fill the project bar a little more, parallel to this they
are also devising stratagems, or ‘Dark Events’ to be deployed against you. For
example, they may crack down on resistance fighters, increasing recruitment
costs, or task a UFO to hunt down the Avenger – your mobile base – which can
obviously have more dire consequences. You can counter their Dark Events and
erode their Avatar progress by completing story, guerrilla, and raid missions. The
Avatar Project is an essential component, and the Dark Events can mix the
flavour of the experience, tactically and strategically. But like most of XCOM
2’s strategic side, they are poorly presented; there’s a sense of mushy
intangibility around the Dark Events and the ‘intel’ resources they use.

The new systems do provide a more varied and meaningfully
differentiated missions, set on a huge pool of maps, more numerous and diverse
than in Enemy Unknown – they also feel larger and denser. The guerrilla
missions usually revolve around an objective with a timer; evacuate a VIP
before alien interceptors arrive and blast your dropship from the sky, or
destroy an alien device before it can transmit data. These timed missions have
the potential to create particularly violent and costly clashes, with tense
moments as you rush your soldiers to the extraction zone on the last possible
turn. They can also feel like the worst kind of bind, one that stifles your
strategic creativity, denies you the opportunity to leverage concealment and
spring orchestrated ambushes.

The Enemy Within expansion pack featured an excellent timed
mission, set in a Chryssalid-infested fishing village. It’s one of the few
specific missions I remember from the previous XCOM, and I do so because it
balanced its timer and enemy obstructions so well, it felt different from the
other missions, including those with timed explosives. At best XCOM 2’s timed
missions can approach a similar level, but there are just too damn many of
them.

For me, things really came to a head when the game bugged
out during a timed mission; with three turns to go I was on the second floor of
a building, the extraction point was predetermined and marked out on the third
floor, which my soldiers refused to ascend to. No amount of mouse wheel action,
or use of the G/T keys (camera height), or camera direction would make my
soldiers plot a path up any of the ladders to the top floor – I experimented
with every possible path by saving and reloading the mission multiple times.
Now fortunately XCOM 2 has great environment destruction, I was able to blow
the third floor with a grenade and force the extraction point to reset to the
ground.

That issue was the kind of problem Enemy Unknown was ripe with.
An expansion and a sequel later, verticality is still a serious problem. Similarly,
there are dozens upon dozens of visual bugs; action-camera perspectives stuck
in walls, soldiers pivoting through solid objects, aliens not animating when
they move, and many more. It is not an exaggeration to say there’s usually at
least one such occurrence in every mission I play. Worse are the times when the
game’s logic takes a hit and simple actions like ending a turn will hitch;
ironically the ranger ability ‘rapid fire’ – the soldier to shoots twice at the
same enemy – is one of the slowest to use, with the soldier ducking back into
cover for several seconds before firing again.

That’s fast compared to the mission load times; both entering
and exiting missions requires loads in excess of a minute for me, running off a
standard hard drive, not a solid-state. Strictly performance problems only
really manifest during the beginnings of missions and just about any time I
click on something back at base, in the strategic layer.

As I eluded at the very beginning, my relationship with XCOM
2 became frayed, not because of the gameplay or difficulty, but because it
degenerated into the single worst technical experience I’ve endured on any
platform in recent years. Around fifteen to twenty hours in, the game started
crashing seemingly at random, a few hours later my computer began spitting up
memory errors as XCOM 2 managed to fill up my 16GBs of RAM almost by itself.
This persisted and worsened to the point that I could barely play a single
mission; if the game didn’t crash it would effectively render my computer
comatose, leaving me no choice but to push the power and restart my machine.
During the last five or so hours of my first campaign I was forced to load the
game, play one mission, save and quit, and load again – if I so much as tried
to promote a character after a mission it would crash.

It was videogame hell, pure and simple, and totally
unacceptable.

It sounds like a memory leak to me, that’s the consensus I saw
online, and it could well be that. I started a second a game to see whether or
not the issue was present and it was, which was odd considering it didn’t
manifest until mid-game on my first run. Through testing I discovered that the
problem was related to the number of save files I had; perhaps eight manual and
a clutch of autosaves. Now with only two manual saves I can play the game like
normal, but XCOM 2 is one of those games where saves actually matter, exactly one
week out from launch there have been no patches.

On a lighter note, multiplayer has returned and appears largely
unchanged, although I couldn’t find a opponent whenever I tried to quick match,
which isn’t totally surprising given the appeal of the single-player. You can
create and save squads using alien and XCOM troops, selection being limited by
a point system, and take them into battle on a host of maps against other
players. Unlike Enemy Unknown there are restrictions on the XCOM soldier
loadouts; all use the mid-tier weapons and armour, presumably for balancing
purposes. They can be visually customised though. To that end, any soldier you
customise in the single player or multiplayer can be saved to a character pool.
Soldiers in the pool will appear in your future games, and can be exported and
shared with other people. Additionally, XCOM 2 officially supports user-created
mods through Steam Workshop integration, so you can go and download for free that
beret the game is so badly missing!

XCOM 2 is a game of systems and mechanics that at times
conspire to create satisfying emotional experiences, beyond the genre-standard
quenching of the player’s megalomaniacal tendencies. Missions are rewarding
puzzles of angles; positioning and line of sight, flavoured by often misleading
hit percentages. The tactical game is tighter than its already clenched
predecessor, but the strategic side has most definitely suffered bloat of the
most needless and perplexing sort, yet the character systems remain feverishly
compelling. Obviously, my greatest complaints come by way of the game’s
technical failures; even if one does not suffer the memory issues that I did,
be safe in the knowledge there’s a world of smaller issues ready to break
animation and gameplay in ways you won’t expect. Hopefully, there aren’t other
huge issues waiting to render the game unplayable, but you can surely
understand my scepticism.

I don’t know what’s worse; that the technical experience was
easily the worst I have endured in recent memory, or that all I can think about
is spinning up that second run, unpatched and unrepentant.